This is largely the methodology I've used throughout my career - that is, starting with a question as to what might be the properties of a set of compounds that could be invented which were unusual and unpredictable. Many times I've felt a bit like Columbus setting sail.
The last thing I'd learn, well into my career, was how to get on, how to say hello, how to get in with the audience.
My dad was a businessman, and he would say, 'Work for free at the best company. Don't get paid a lot of money to work with the worst people. ' And that's exactly how I see my career.
I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.
I know a lot of actors who started out as musicians and have very successful careers as actors, but most people don't know them as musicians.
I've always viewed my career with some suspicion, like I don't want to count on it to be the only thing I do. Partly that has to do with feeling like an imposter, like we all do sometimes, and partly I like doing other things, and being a full-time artist takes a focus I recognise I don't have.
I wouldn't trade my career with anybody's. I'd trade a few movies with Tom Hanks - 'Apollo 13 and 'Forrest Gump' - but other than that, I love my career.
For so much of my career I've been trying to find little things and make something out of it.
Should it happen tomorrow, I would fall to my knees to give thanks to God for such a career.
In a consumer society, expectations dare not plateau, because a growing economy depends on rising expectations. . . The more we let our level of contentment be determined by outside factors-a new car, fashionable clothes, a prestigious career, social status-the more we relinquish control over our own happiness.
My husband always felt that a marriage and career don't mix. That's why he's never worked.
I don't have a lot of thrilling anecdotes about my career or personal life. All the stuff that is interesting is private and I wouldn't want people to know.
It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [. . . ] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.
By the time I was ready for college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I think I secretly wanted a show business career, but I was suppressing it.
As I've moved along - not only my life, but my career and things like that - you look at yourself and start going, 'Oh, man, are you still doing what you set out to do? Are the ideals you had still the same?' Sometimes you measure up and sometimes you don't.
I can be highly competitive, which is ultimately why I chose yoga as a career. I thought it would drain the competitive drive out of me and allow me to be present and content. The yoga world has become highly competitive since then and it used to drive me crazy until I realized there's work for everyone.
I uprooted my life from Australia and came over to America with the idea of pursuing my acting career. I wasn't really sure where I would end up. I threw caution to the wind.
Equally, though, there are guys who play England Under 19 who don't even play First Class cricket. It is a watershed in the careers in many ways.
I have. . . spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivatives trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. Of course no one wants to take an undue career risk by sticking their head up. . . The fewer people who know who wrote this report the better. I am worried about the personal safety of myself and my family.